NYT: Cost of a Paywall
By Asha

The New York Times has won more than 100 Pulitzer Prizes and its website is the most popular news site in USA.  Being an iconic American newspaper gives it a wide reach among the powers that be in other countries including India.  New York Times journalists travel in the same plane as President Obama while all other media representatives travel in a dedicated media plane.

Recently, New York Times put their online content behind a paywall.  Users would have to pay to read more than 20 articles per month.

In an internet culture of free news and views, paywalls don’t work.  Internet monitoring company Hitwise has worked out how New York Times lost as many as 15 percent of its readers on some days after the paywall was introduced

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After months of speculation, the paywall for The New York Times went live at 2pm on Monday, March 28th, which limits online readers (non-print subscribers) to 20 articles each month. For smartphone and tablet applications, only the top news section will remain free and access to other sections will need a subscription.

To understand the initial impact, we compared the total visits to NYTimes.com for a 12 day period before the launch of the pay wall to the 12 days following the launch. For the majority of the days, there was a decrease in the overall visits between 5% and 15%. The one exception was Saturday, April 9th, 2011 where there was a 7% increase, likely due to visitors seeking news around the potential government shutdown and ongoing budget discussions.
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Most experts feel that long term New York Times may lose as many as 40 percent of its online readers because of this paywall.